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From: Glenn on 7 May 2008 02:14
A colleague returned from CommunityOne today and brought an
OpenSolaris
2008.05 Live CD back with him. So naturally, I immediately took the
opportunity to load it up. The machine is a Dell Optiplex 170L, which
I had previously loaded a recent release of S10 on. The S10 load was
unusable; the network device was not recognized without a config-file
modification (which did allow it to work), but more seriously, the
system would mysteriously hang (I suspected some kind of driver
problem
with the hard disk, as a recursive find would hang).

OpenSolaris fixes those problems. The network device works without
any
manual adjustments, and I don't see any disk hangs. However, there
are
other issues:

* xterm takes 16 seconds to start up. This is completely repeatable,
but also completely absurd on a 3GHz machine.

* The network stuff was automagically set up at boot time, except that
the hostname was put into /etc/hosts on the 127.0.0.1 line rather
than on a separate line indicating the external IP address of the
machine. I only mention that because some googling suggested that
this kind of thing might affect the xterm startup time. But fixing
it had no such effect.

* I cannot find any simple means to swap the Caps Lock and Control
keys. Under Linux, gnome-keyboard-properties has a Layout tab that
lets me trivially set this in place. That tab is missing in the
OpenSolaris version.

* The Gnome clock in the upper right corner of the screen increments
somewhat erratically, when I turn on displaying seconds. Watching
the clock, the increment intervals are quite clearly not uniform.

* I can ssh out of the machine, but I cannot ping or ssh into the
machine. I'm guessing this is some sort of default security
setting,
but there is no obvious way to trace a path from that evidence to
whatever is needed to fix it.

* /var/adm/messages tells me there are two device drivers using the
same IRQ16 level, which "may affect performance", but it doesn't
tell
me which drivers they are. My Windows admin tells me that if he had
MS bits on the disk, he could use some standard tool to instantly
identify the issue and correct it. But of course I took the option
to wipe the disk clean when I installed OpenSolaris. And I have no
idea what tools Solaris might supply for equivalent functionality.
(I'm historically a SPARC guy, so I don't have experience at that
level in the x86 domain.)

* The Live CD obviously stores less content than the previous SXDE DVD
release. But none of the release-notes stuff that is immediately at
hand after the install seems to suggest a standard Sun-supported IPS
repository from which to download all the equivalent packages. For
that matter, there's no obvious tool to even list what IPS packages
are on the machine and which ones are available but missing.

Any clues as to how to address these issues?
From: Dave on 7 May 2008 02:28
Glenn wrote:
> A colleague returned from CommunityOne today and brought an
> OpenSolaris
> 2008.05 Live CD back with him. So naturally, I immediately took the
> opportunity to load it up. The machine is a Dell Optiplex 170L, which
> I had previously loaded a recent release of S10 on. The S10 load was
> unusable; the network device was not recognized without a config-file
> modification (which did allow it to work), but more seriously, the
> system would mysteriously hang (I suspected some kind of driver
> problem
> with the hard disk, as a recursive find would hang).
>
> OpenSolaris fixes those problems. The network device works without
> any
> manual adjustments, and I don't see any disk hangs. However, there
> are
> other issues:
>
> * xterm takes 16 seconds to start up. This is completely repeatable,
> but also completely absurd on a 3GHz machine.

I've never used a live CD for Solaris, but I believe there are more than
one live version in existance. It might be worth showing the contents of
/etc/release.

If you let the machine run idle for a few minutes what does prstat say?
I wonder if there is some CPU bound process eating up your resources.
Several of these things could explained by a lack of computer power, but
on a 3 GHz machine that should not be an issue of course. But if there
is a runaway process...

I get the message about IRQ being shared on my laptop. I've not
investigated it, but I would be interested in any replies you get on this.

kestrel / % svcs ssh
STATE STIME FMRI
online Apr_03 svc:/network/ssh:default

should give you the status of the sshd deamon. Certainly on all solariss
I've seen, this is enabled by default. ftp and telnet are not, but ssh yes.

From: Chris Ridd on 7 May 2008 02:34
On 2008-05-07 07:28:55 +0100, Dave <foo(a)coo.com> said:

> Glenn wrote:
>> A colleague returned from CommunityOne today and brought an
>> OpenSolaris
>> 2008.05 Live CD back with him. So naturally, I immediately took the
>> opportunity to load it up. The machine is a Dell Optiplex 170L, which
>> I had previously loaded a recent release of S10 on. The S10 load was
>> unusable; the network device was not recognized without a config-file
>> modification (which did allow it to work), but more seriously, the
>> system would mysteriously hang (I suspected some kind of driver
>> problem
>> with the hard disk, as a recursive find would hang).
>>
>> OpenSolaris fixes those problems. The network device works without
>> any
>> manual adjustments, and I don't see any disk hangs. However, there
>> are
>> other issues:
>>
>> * xterm takes 16 seconds to start up. This is completely repeatable,
>> but also completely absurd on a 3GHz machine.
>
> I've never used a live CD for Solaris, but I believe there are more
> than one live version in existance. It might be worth showing the
> contents of /etc/release.

The version of the just released OpenSolaris live CD is "2008.05".

To debug xterm (really xterm? not gnome-terminal?) I'd run a copy under
truss to see where the slowdown is. It is almost certainly waiting for
something.

> kestrel / % svcs ssh
> STATE STIME FMRI
> online Apr_03 svc:/network/ssh:default
>
> should give you the status of the sshd deamon. Certainly on all
> solariss I've seen, this is enabled by default. ftp and telnet are not,
> but ssh yes.

It should be enabled and accessible by default too. Check
<http://opensolaris.org/os/community/security/projects/sbd/> for more
info.

Cheers,

Chris

From: Oscar del Rio on 7 May 2008 09:52
Glenn wrote:

> * The Live CD obviously stores less content than the previous SXDE DVD
> release. But none of the release-notes stuff that is immediately at
> hand after the install seems to suggest a standard Sun-supported IPS
> repository from which to download all the equivalent packages. For
> that matter, there's no obvious tool to even list what IPS packages
> are on the machine and which ones are available but missing.


pkg.opensolaris.org

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks very easy in the screencast

http://frsun.downloads.edgesuite.net/sun/08D12331/index.html


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